Rage Against the Muzak

I push a cart up and down the supermarket aisles, drifting like a
Stepford wife past shelves dense with a hundred varieties of mayonnaise and a
thousand brands of soup and ten thousand variations of orange juice and a
hundred thousand nuances of ice cream: All the metaphysical abundance and
diversity of the universe organized, canned, packaged, frozen, bar-coded,
neatly awaiting the pleasure of our consumption.

If we have such options of ingestibles  I am not complaining; our
stomachs have, by the standards of most of human history, died and gone to a
heaven that they scarcely deserve  why are we forced to shop for them under
a steady downpour of moronic canned music? This horrible amenity punishes the
senses with throbbing, moaning, whining agitations of the stupidest trailer
trashiness that venality can distill.

Now I admit that if one considers all the evils loose in the world
(poverty, pollution, terrorism, global warming, drug addiction, famine,
Bryant Gumbel), canned music does not cry out to heaven for vengeance. But
small evils---the evils of banality--- also need attention, especially when
they become universal. Canned music is what you expect to hear when you die
and go to hell. "De la musique, avant toute chose," advised the symbolist
poet Paul Verlaine. I'll give you de la musique: In one ear, in the other.

We accept this imbecility---passively, without complaint. Or have trained
ourselves to tune it out.

The noise has achieved cultural permeation, critical mass: It's
everywhere, in chain pharmacies, department stores, restaurants, beauty
parlors, shopping malls in every corner of the global village. Once my wife
and I were driving across the Sinai desert and found a modern hotel in the
middle of nowhere, like a mirage. We went in for lunch. We were the only
persons in the hotel, except for the staff. They had a canned music system,
and when we entered, the desk clerk rushed to the sound control panel to turn
on the stuff ("Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," a little oasis of song in
the Sinai). He watched us intently, and as we passed from lobby to dining
room, and I, eventually, to the men's room, the clerk switched on the speaker
in that particular room in turn, so that we were never without the bouncy,
relentless companionship.

Aux armes, citoyens! Shake off passivity. We must recover some of the
aesthetic activism that came into play in the Astor Place Riots of May, 1849,
when New York audiences of Shakespeare divided their loyalties between the
American actor Edwin Forrest and the British actor William Charles Macready.
Forrest gave a crude, robust, vehement interpretation of Macbeth. Macready
was more cerebral.

Feelings ran very high. At Macready's opening performance at the Astor
Place Opera House, on May 7, partisans of Forrest threw rotten eggs and
potatoes. Does this give you ideas? Think of the ammunition available in a
supermarket.

I admit that the Astor Place activism got out of hand. A force of citizen
militia was called for Macready's next performance, on May 10. An immense
crowd gathered outside the theater, as many as ten thousand people. The
militia fired warning shots in the air, and then panicked and fired into the
crowd. Twenty-two people were killed and fifty were wounded. That's a fairly
large butcher's bill to pay for a dispute over interpretations of Shakespeare.

Still, the principle (I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it
anymore) is a good one, especially when the target is not live performers
doing something as sublime as Shakespeare, but, on the contrary, dead
speakers exhaling dead music that destroys brain cells. It's time for a
little rage against the machines that emit such toxins.